Month: August 2014

We’re so excited to announce the all-new RBCommons 2.0. This is a major update that improves the service in so many ways that we won’t be able to fit it into one post. It’s faster, more reliable, easier to use, and full of polish.

Let’s go over a few of the new features.

A super-charged diff viewer

The first thing you’ll see in the new diff viewer is a new file index. At a glance, you’ll see not only what files were changed, but the complexity of the changes. The ring icons beside each file show the proportions of inserted lines, deleted lines, and replaced lines. The thickness of the ring shows how much of the file has been modified.

In most diff viewers, indentation-only changes look just like any other changes. You have to spend time checking to make sure that the content didn’t actually change along with the indentation.

Not here! Now, indentation-only changes are shown with little markers, which show exactly how many spaces or tabs were used. You won’t have to spend any time looking at whether the text in the line has changed. You’ll know at a glance.

We’ve also improved the quality of interdiffs (especially when dealing with merges), made moved line detection much smarter, and added an easy-to-use revision selector to quickly jump between diff revisions and interdiffs without reloading the page.

The new “New Review Request” page

We’ve completely rewritten the New Review request page, making it simpler to upload your diff and check it for errors. We’ve also gone further and added one-click posting of committed changes for review. Simply select a branch, browse through your commits, and click to post. In seconds, it’ll be up and ready for review.

Detailed change histories

When you’re working on large changes with several iterations, it’s important to know exactly what changed. We’ve always provided change histories, but they were pretty basic. Now, they’re anything but.

A slicker dashboard

We cleaned up the dashboard navigation and layout to help you jump between your incoming and outgoing review requests. The sidebar is less cluttered and confusing, and actually useful.

We’ve also addressed two of our most-requested features: Issue counts in the dashboard, and batch closing of review requests.

The Ship It column now shows the number of open issues filed against a review request, if any. These always take precedence over any Ship Its, helping you know at a glance if there’s any feedback you need to address.

The all-new “Select Rows” column in the dashboard lets you select multiple review requests and close them in one go. It’s very useful when trying to clean up your dashboard if you’ve gotten behind in closing review requests, or if a former teammate leaves. Simply click the pencil in the top-right of the dashboard to add this column, and drag it where you want it.

Lots more!

This post is getting pretty long, so we’ll wrap it up. Basically, a lot has changed, and we only touched upon a few of the features. Some others include:

Markdown support in all text fields

Faster posting of review requests from RBTools

Retina icons

New support for reviewing different text-based file attachments

Reviewers can close issues they filed

Easy download of files in the diff viewer

In the coming weeks, we’ll go into more detail on some of the more useful additions in this release, including tips and tricks on how to get the most out of RBCommons 2.0.

This was a pretty major release, so if you have any issues, please contact us immediately so we can resolve them!

Updated Saturday, 1:50AM PST: We had some issues with one of the new servers, and had to roll some things back temporarily. This is extending our maintenance window. Hopefully nobody will be too badly affected, but we’ll be down until approximately 5AM PST.

We’re making a huge update to RBCommons this weekend. The site will be down for up to 4 hours starting Friday at 11PM PST, as we begin our upgrade to the all-new RBCommons 2.0.

This new update is based on Review Board 2.0, and brings some major improvements to the dashboard, diff viewer, review request change histories, performance, and more. A few of the new features you can expect include:

Fewer full-page reloads

Faster load times

Better, more accurate interdiffs

Markdown input for all text fields

Indentation markers in diffs

Smarter moved line detection in diffs

A nicer dashboard, which better displays when changes are approved, or if they have pending issues still open

Bulk-closing of review requests through the dashboard

Easy posting of existing commits on your GitHub or Subversion repositories, right from the New Review Request page

Faster posting of changes using RBTools

Better display of exactly what changed in updates to review requests

High-DPI icons for those on Retina or equivalent displays

Review of text-based file attachments

That’s just a few of the features that this release will bring. We’ll go into more detail after everything’s deployed.

On top of this, we’re moving onto much faster servers, which should help with some of the growth spurts we’ve been hitting lately.

So wrap up your work before this Friday at 11PM PST (Saturday, 6AM UTC). We’ll be shutting down the servers for up to 4 hours as we move to the new servers and begin the upgrade. It shouldn’t take the full 4 hours, but we want to allow for any issues that come up.

This weekend, we’re beginning a series of upgrades to our infrastructure that should resolve some stability issues we’ve periodically hit with our database server on AWS. It should also help to improve performance across the site.

This work will start Sunday, August 17th at 6AM UTC (that’s Saturday at 11PM PST for those in California). We’re blocking off two hours for the work, at which point the site will be down. It shouldn’t take nearly that long, though.

Going forward, we’re gearing up for a big update to RBCommons. Along with this, we’re planning some further hardware upgrades that should do a lot to further improve performance. We’re planning this for some time in the next two weeks. We’ll announce the details when we’re closer.

If you are worried that your team is going to be horribly impacted by this maintenance window, please let us know!

Updated Sunday, 12:33AM PST: Maintenance is complete, and we’re back up and running!

A few months back, we finished up the release of Review Board 2.0, a major release offering features such as Markdown text editing, an improved diff viewer, easy posting of existing commits for review, open issue integration in the dashboard, and more.

We’ve been working to update RBCommons for the Review Board 2.0 codebase, and are happy to announce that the first public beta is ready! We’re trying to squash any remaining bugs, so please play around with it and report back to us.

A few important notes:

Your review requests and reviews will not sync between the beta server and rbcommons.com. Don’t use it for production work. Your data will be lost when we switch over.

The database is from August 4th. Your review requests and reviews made since then will not be there. This is normal!

DO NOT make any changes to your billing or cancel your team or user account on the beta! This will affect your main RBCommons account.

If you signed up in the past week and your team or user account is not available on the demo server, contact us, and we’ll get you set up.